The Centaurus

IV

AFTER SCHOOL I went up to my father’s room, Room

204. Two students were in there with him. I glared at them both and in my haughty red shirt crossed to the window and looked toward Alton. I had made a vow during the day to protect my father, and these two students consuming his time were the first enemies I had encountered. One was Deifendorf, the other was Judy Lengel. Deifendorf was speaking.

“I can see shop and typing and like that, Mr. Caldwell,” he said, “but for somebody like me who’s not going on to college or anything, I don’t see the point of memorizing lists of animals that’ve been dead a million years.”

“There is no point,” my father said. “You are two hundred per cent right: who cares about dead animals? If they’re dead, let ‘em lie; that’s my motto. They depress the hell out of me. But that’s what they give me to teach and I’m going to teach it to you until it kills me. It’s either you or me, Deifendorf, and if you don’t get rid of those jitters I’ll do my best to kill you before you kill me; I’ll strangle you with my bare hands if I have to. I’m up here fighting for my life. I have a wife and a kid and an old man to feed. I’m just like you are; I’d rather be out walking the streets. I feel sorry for you; I know how you’re suffering.”

I laughed by the window; it was my way of attacking Deifendorf. I felt him clinging to my father, sucking the strength from him. That was the way of the cruel children. An hour after they had goaded him to the point of frenzy (flecks of foam would actually appear in the corners of his mouth and his eyes would become like tiny raw diamonds), they would show up in his room, anxious to seek advice, make confessions, be reassured. And the instant they had left his company they would mock him again. I kept my back turned on the sickening duet.

From my father’s windows I overlooked the school’s side lawn, where in the autumn the band and cheerleaders rehearsed, and the tennis courts and the line of horsechestnut trees marking the poorhouse lane and, beyond everything, Mt. Alton, a humped blue horizon scarred by a gravel pit. A trolley car stuffed with Alton shoppers came sparking and swaying up the line. Some of the students who lived toward Alton were bunched at the stop, waiting for this trolley’s mate to come down the pike. Down on the cement walks leading from the girls’ exit along the side of the building- I had to touch my nose to the icy glass to see this sharply down-girls, foreshortened into patches of plaid, fur, books, and wool, walked in pairs and trios home together. Frozen breath flew from their mouths. What they said I could not hear. I looked for Penny among them. I had avoided her all day, because to draw near to her seemed a desertion of my parents, whose need for me had mysteriously, solemnly deepened.

“…the only one,” Deifendorf was saying to my father. His voice scratched. His voice was queerly feeble, disassociated from his emphatic, athletic body. I had often seen Deifendorf naked in the locker room. He had stumpy legs woolly with sandy fur and a huge rubbery torso and sloping shining shoulders and very long arms culminating in red scoop-shaped hands. He was a swimmer.

“That’s right, you’re not, you’re not the only one,” my father told him. “But on the whole, Deifendorf, I’d say you’re the worst. I’d say you’re the itchiest kid I have on my hands this year.” He made this estimate dispassionately. There were things-itchiness, intelligence, athletic ability -that his years of teaching had given him absolute pitch in gauging.

No Penny had popped up among the girls below. Behind me, the quality of Deifendorf’s silence seemed baffled and even hurt. He had a vulnerable side. He loved my father. It pains me to admit it, but there existed between this obscene animal and my father an actual affection. I resented it. I resented how lavishly my father outpoured himself before the boy, as if somewhere in all this nonsense there might be the healing drop. “The Founding Fathers,” he explained, “in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education. School is where you go between when your parents can’t take you and industry can’t take you. I am a paid keeper of Society’s unusables-the lame, the halt, the insane, and the ignorant. The only incentive I can give you, kid, to behave yourself is this: if you don’t buckle down and learn something, you’ll be as dumb as I am, and you’ll have to teach school to earn a living. When the Depression hit me in ‘31, I had nothing. I knew nothing. God had taken care of me all my life so I was unemployable. So out of the goodness of his heart my father-in-law’s nephew Al Hummel got me a job teaching. I don’t wish it on you, kid. Even though you’re my worst enemy I don’t wish it on you.”

I was staring, ears warm, toward Mt. Alton. As if through an imperfection in the glass I looked around a corner of time and foresaw, fantastically, that Deifendorf would teach. And so it was to be. Fourteen years later, I went home and on an Alton side-street met Deifendorf in a saggy brown suit from whose breast pocket the pencils and pens thrust as from my father’s pocket in the old forgotten days. Deifendorf had gone fat and his hairline had receded, but it was he. He asked me, dared in all seriousness to ask me, an authentic second-rate abstract expressionist living in an East Twenty-third Street loft with a Negro mistress, me, if I was ever going to teach. I told him No. He told me, his pale dull eyes shelled in Seriousness, “Pete, I often think of what your Dad used to tell me about teaching. ‘It’s rough,’ he’d say, ‘but you can’t beat it for the satisfaction you get.’ Now I’m teaching myself, I see what he meant. A great man, your Dad. Did you know that?”

And now in his weak and scratchy whine of a voice he be gan to tell my father something of the sort. “I ain’t no enemy, Mr. Caldwell. I like you. All the kids like you.”

“That’s my trouble, Deifendorf. That’s the worst thing can happen to a public school teacher. I don’t want you to like me. All I want from you is to sit still under me for fifty-five minutes a day five days a week. When you walk into my room, Deifendorf, I want you to be stiff with fear. Caldwell the Kid-Killer; that’s how I want you to think of me. Brrouh!”

I turned from the window and laughed, determined to interrupt. The two of them, the chipped yellow desk between, hunched toward each other like conspirators. My father looked sallow and nauseated, his temples glazed and hollow; the top of his desk was littered with papers and tin-jawed binders and paperweights like half-metamorphosed toads. Deifendorf had stolen his strength; teaching was sapping him. I saw this helplessly. I saw helplessly in the smirk on Deify’s face that from my father’s whirl of words he had gathered a sense of superiority, a sense of being, in comparison with this addled and vehement shipwreck of a man, young, clean, sleek, clear-headed, well-coordinated, and invincible.

My father, embarrassed by my angry witnessing, changed the subject. “Be at the Y by 6:30,” he told Deifendorf curtly. There was a swimming meet this evening and Deifendorf was on the team.

“We’ll dunk ‘em for ya, Mr. Caldwell,” Deifendorf promised. “They’ll be cocky and ripe for an upset.” Our swimming team had not won a meet all season: Olinger was a very land kind of town. It had no public pool, and the poorhouse dam’s bottom was lined with broken bottles. My father was, by one of those weird strokes whereby Zimmerman kept the faculty in a malleable flux of confusion, the team’s coach, though his hernia prevented him from ever going into the water.

“Do your best is all we can do,” my father said. “You can’t walk on water.”

I believe now that my father wanted this last statement to be contradicted, but none of the three others of us in the room saw the need.

Judy Lengel was the third student in the room. My father’s view of her was that her father bullied her beyond the limit of her mental abilities. I doubted this; in my opinion Judy was just a girl who being neither pretty nor bright had spite fully developed a petty ambitiousness with which she tormented the gullible teachers like my father. She seized the silence to say, “Mr. Caldwell, I was wondering about that quiz tomorrow-”

“Just a moment, Judy.” Deifendorf was attempting to leave, sated. He all but belched as he got up from his chair. My father asked him, “Deify, how are you and cigarettes? If anybody reports you smoking again you’re off the team.”

The feeble primitive voice whined from the doorway. “I ain’t touched a weed since the beginning of season, Mr. Caldwell.”

“Don’t lie to me, kid. Life’s too short to lie. About fifty-seven varieties of people have squealed to me about your smoking and if I’m caught protecting you Zimmerman’ll have my neck.”

“O.K., Mr. Caldwell. I got you.”

“I want the breast stroke and the two-twenty freestyle from you tonight.”

“You’ll get ‘em, Mr. Caldwell.”

I shut my eyes. It agonized me to hear my father talk like a coach; it seemed so beneath us. This was unfair; for wasn’t it after all what I wanted to hear from him-the confident, ordinary, world-supporting accents of other men? Perhaps it hurt me that Deifendorf had something concrete to give my father-the breast stroke and the two-twenty freestyle-while I had nothing. Unwilling to expose my skin, I had never learned to swim. The world of water was closed to me, so I had fallen in love with the air, which I was able to seize in great thrilling condensations within me that I labelled the Future: it was in this realm that I hoped to reward my father for his suffering.

“Now. Judy,” he said.

“I don’t understand what the quiz will be about.”

“Chapters Eight, Nine, and Ten, as I said today in class.”

“But that’s so much.”

“Skim it, Judy. You’re no dope. You know how to study.” My father flipped open the book, the gray textbook with the microscope, the atom, and the dinosaur on the cover. “Look for italicized words,” he said. “Here. Magma. What is magma?”

“Will that be one of the questions?”

“I can’t tell you the questions, Judy. That wouldn’t be fair to the others. But for your own information, what is magma?”

“Like comes from volcanoes?”

“I’d accept that. Magma is igneous rock in its molten state. And here. Name the three types of rocks.”

“Will you ask that?”

“I can’t tell you, Judy. You understand that. But what are they?”

“Sentimentary…”

“Igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic. Give me an example of each.”

“Granite, limestone, and marble,” I said. Judy looked over at me in fright.

“Or basalt, shale, and slate,” my father said. The dull girl looked from me to him to me as if we had ganged up on her. For the moment, we had. There were happy moments when my father and I became a unit, a little two-ply team. “You want to know something interesting, Judy?” my father said. “The richest deposit of slate on the continent is right next door to us in Pennsylvania, in Lehigh and Northampton counties.” He tapped with his knuckles the blackboard behind him. “Every blackboard from coast to coast comes from around there,” he said.

“We aren’t expected to know that, are we?”

“It’s not in the book, no. But I thought you’d be interested. Try to get interested. Forget your grades; your father will survive. Don’t knock yourself out, Judy; when I was your age, I didn’t know what it was like to be young. And I’ve never learned since. Now Judy. Listen to me. Some have it and some don’t. But everybody has something, even if it’s just being alive. The good Lord didn’t put us here to worry about what we don’t have. The man with two talents didn’t get sore at the man with five. Look at me and Peter. I have no talents, he has ten; but I’m not mad at him. I like him. He’s my son.”

She opened her mouth and I expected her to ask “Will that be on the quiz?” but nothing came out. My father ruffled the book. “Name some erosional agents,” he said.

She ventured, “Time?”

My father looked up and seemed to have taken a blow. His skin was underbelly-white beneath his eyes and an un natural ruddy flush scored his cheeks in distinct parallels like the marks of angry fingers. “I’d have to think about that,” he told her. “I was thinking of running water, glaciers, and wind.”

She wrote these down on her tablet.

“Diastrophism,” he said. “Isostasy. Explain them. Sketch a seismograph. What is a batholith?”

“You wouldn’t ask all of those, would you?” she asked. “I might not ask any of them,” he said; “Don’t think about the quiz. Think about the earth. Don’t you love her? Don’t you want to know about her? Isostasy is like a great fat woman adjusting her girdle.”

Judy’s face lacked ease. Her cheeks were packed too tautly against her nose, making the lines there deep and sharp; and there was a third vertical crease at the tip of her nose. Her mouth, too, had this look of too many folds, and when she spoke it worked tightly, up and down, like the mouth of a snapdragon. “Would you ask about the Protozone or whatever those things are?”

“Proterozoic Era. Yes, ma’am. A question might be, List the six geologic eras in order, with rough dates. When was the Cenozoic?”

“A billion years ago?”

“You live in it, girl. We all do. It began seventy million years ago. Or I might do this, list some extinct forms of life, and ask that they be identified, with one point for the identification, one for the era, and one for the period. For instance, Brontops: mammal, Cenozoic, Tertiary. Eocene epoch, but I wouldn’t expect you to know that. It may interest you for your own information that the brontops looked a lot like William Howard Taft, who was President when I was your age.”

I saw her write “No Epocks” on her tablet and draw a box around it. As my father talked on, she began to ornament the box with triangles. “Or Lepidodendron,” he said. “Giant fern, Paleozoic, Pennsylvanian. Or Eryops. What would that be, Peter?”

I really didn’t know. “A reptile,” I guessed. “Mesozoic.”

“An amphibian,” he said. “Earlier. Or Archaeopteryx,” he said, his voice quickening, sure we would know it. “What’s that, Judy?”

“Archy what?” she asked.

“Archaeopteryx.” He sighed. “The first bird. It was about the size of a crow. Its feathers evolved from scales. Study the chart on pages two-oh-three to two-oh-nine. Don’t tense up. Study the chart, and memorize what you’ve written down, and you’ll do all right.”

“I get so sort of sick and dizzy just trying to keep it straight,” she blurted, and it seemed she might cry. Her face was a folded bud, but already in her life it had begun to wilt. She was pale and this pallor for a moment swam around the room whose shades of varnish were like shades of honey gathered in a sweetly rotten forest.

“We all do,” my father said, and things became firm again. “Knowledge is a sickening thing. Just do the best you can, Judy, and don’t lose any beauty sleep. Don’t get buffaloed. After Wednesday you can forget all about it and in no time you’ll be married with six kids.” And it dawned on me, with some indignation, that my father out of pity had hinted away to her the entire quiz.

When she left the room, he got up and closed the door and said to me, “That poor femme, her father’ll have an old maid on his hands.” We were alone together.

I stopped leaning against the windowsill and said, “Maybe that’s what he wants.” I was very conscious of wearing a red shirt; its flicker on the floor of my vision as I moved about the room seemed to instill my words with an enigmatic urbanity.

“Don’t you believe it,” my father said. “The worst thing in the world is a bitter woman. That’s one thing about your mother, she’s never been bitter. You won’t understand this, Peter, but your mother and I had a lot of fun together.”

I doubted this, but the way he said it rendered me silent. One by one, it seemed to me, my father was saying good bye to all the things he had known in this world. He took a sheet of blue paper from his desk and handed it to me. “Read it arid weep,” he said. My first thought was that it was a fatal medical report. My stomach sank. I wondered, How could he have gotten it so soon?

But it was just one of Zimmerman’s monthly visitation reports.

OLINGER PUBLIC SCHOOLS

OFFICE OF THE SUPERVISING PRINCIPAL

1/10/47

teacher: G. W. Caldwell

class: 10th grade Gen. Sci., sec. C

period of visitation: 1/8/47 11:05 am.

The teacher arrived in the classroom twelve minutes late. His surprise at finding the supervising principal in charge was evident and was remarked upon by the class. Ignoring his students, the teacher attempted to engage the supervising principal in conversation and was refused. The students and the teacher then discussed the age of the universe, the size of the stars, the origins of the earth, and the outline of organic evolution. No attempt was discernible on the teacher’s part to avoid offending religious conceptions on the students’ part. The humanistic values implicit in the physical sciences were not elicited. The teacher at one point stopped himself from pronouncing the word “hell.” Disorder and noise were present from the beginning and rose in volume. The students did not seem well-prepared and the teacher consequently resorted to the lecture method. A minute before the final bell, he struck one boy on the back with a steel rod. Such physical procedure of course violates Pennsylvania state law and in the event of parental protest could result in dismissal.

However, the teacher’s knowledge of his subject matter seemed good and some of his illustrations relating subject matter to his students’ everyday lives were effective.

Signed,

Louis M. Zimmerman.

My father was pulling the windowshades and the room had been jerked into dusk as I read. “Well,” I said, “he thinks you’re effective.”

“Isn’t that the worst God-damn report was ever written? He must have stayed up all night with that masterpiece. If the school board gets ahold of that, I’m O-U-T out, tenure or no tenure.”

“Who was the kid you hit?” I asked.

“Deifendorf. That Davis bitch got the poor bastard all excited.”

“What’s poor about him? He broke our Buick grille and now he’s going to get you fired. And two minutes ago he was in here and you were telling him the story of your life.”

“He’s dumb, Peter. I feel sorry for him. It takes a rat to love a rat.” I swallowed a taste of envy and said, “Daddy, this isn’t such a bad report.”

“It couldn’t be worse,” he said, striding down the aisle with the windowpole. “It’s murder. And I deserve it. Fifteen years of teaching, and it’s all right there. Fifteen years of hell.” He took a rag from the book closet and went out the door. I read the report over again, trying to get some picture of Zimmerman’s actual mind. I couldn’t. My father came back, having soaked the rag at the drinking fountain in the hall. With long rhythmic swipes shaped like sideways 8’s he washed the blackboard. His earnest swishing underlined the silence; high on the wall the clock, controlled by the master clock in Zimmerman’s office, clicked, jumping from 4:17 to 4:18. “What does he mean,” I asked, “the humanistic values implicit in the physical sciences?”

“You ask him,” my father said. “Maybe he knows. Maybe down deep in the atom there’s a little man sitting in a rocking chair reading the evening paper.”

“Do you really think the school board will see this?”

“Pray not, kid. It’s on file. I have three enemies on that board, one friend, and one I don’t know. Mrs. Herzog I don’t know if she’s heads or tails. They’d love to get me out of there. Get rid of the dead wood. A lot of veterans on this GI Bill and they’re all gonna need jobs.” He was grunting as he washed.

“Maybe you should get out of teaching,” I said. My mother and I had often discussed this, but our discussions were cramped, for we kept bumping our heads against the fact that my father’s teaching was what sheltered us and let us live.

“Too late, too late,” my father said. “Too late, too late.” He looked at the clock and said, “Jesus, I’m not kidding- I’m late. I told Doc Appleton I’d be there at 4:30.”

My face baked with fear. My father never went to doctors. For the first time, I had proof that his illness was not an illusion; it was spreading outward into the world like a stain. “Really? You’re really going?” I was begging him to deny it.

He knew my thoughts, and as we confronted each other through the vibrating shadows of the room a locker slammed, a child whistled, the clock clicked. “I called him this noon,” my father said, as if he were confessing a sin to me. “I just want to go and hear him tell how smart he was at med school.” He hung the wet rag over the back of his chair to dry and went to the windowsill and untwisted the pencil sharpener case and poured a rosy stream of shavings into the wastebasket. The scent of cedar filled the room like the perfume of an offering.

I asked, “Can I go with you?”

“Don’t do that, Peter. Go to the luncheonette and kill the time with your friends. I’ll pick you up in an hour and we’ll go into Alton.”

“No, I’ll go with you. I don’t have any friends.”

He took the sadly short coat from his closet. I followed him out. He closed the door of Room 204 behind us and we went down the stairs and through the first floor hall and past the glinting trophy case. This case depressed me; I first saw it as a tiny child and still had a superstitious sense of each silver urn containing the ashes of a departed spirit. Heller, the head janitor, was sprinkling crumbs of red wax over the floor and sweeping them toward us with a broad broom. “Another day, another dollar,” my father called to him.

“Ach, ja” the janitor called back. “Too soon oldt and too late schmardt.” Heller was a short dark Dutchman with solidly black hair though he was sixty. He wore rimless glasses that made him look more scholarly than most of the teachers in the building. His voice echoed after my father’s down the hollow length of the hall, which looked wet where light from a doorway or window lay on it. I was reassured, believing that nothing as absolute and awesome as death could enter a world where grown men could exchange such banalities. While my father waited, I ran to my locker in the annex hall and got my pea jacket and some books; I thought, wrongly, there might be some space in the coming hours when I could do some homework. As I returned to them I heard my father apologizing to Heller for, apparently, a few marks he had made on the floor. “No,” he said, “I hate to make the wonderful work you do any harder for you than it is. Don’t think I don’t appreciate what a job it is to keep this stockyard clean. It’s the Augean stable every day of the week.”

“Ah well,” Heller said, and shrugged. As I came closer, his black shape stooped, so the handle of the broom seemed to pierce it. He straightened and presented in the palm of his open hand, for my father’s and my inspection, a few dry oblongs bigger than ordinary dirt and not readily identifiable. “Seeds,” he said.

“What kid would be carrying seeds?” my father asked.

“Maybe from an orange?” Heller suggested.

“One goddam more mystery,” my father said, and he seemed to shy, and we went out into the weather.

The afternoon was clear and cold and the sun above the westward section of town made our shadows long before us. We seemed from our shadow to be a prancing one-headed creature with four legs. A trolley car went down the pike, its connective wheel sizzling and sparking on the wire, west ward into Alton. This was our ultimate direction; we were for the time being working against the tide. In striding silence, my steps three to his two, we passed the school’s side lawn. Some yards back from the pavement, there was a glass-fronted billboard. Miss Schrack’s senior art class made the posters for it; the present one displayed a great B painted in the school’s colors, maroon and gold, and announced:

BASKETBALL

TUESDAY

7 o’clock

We crossed the little irregular asphalt alley that separated the school property from Hummel’s Garage. Here the pavement was stained with little maps of dropped oil, islands and archipelagos and continents undiscovered on this globe. We passed the pumps, and passed the neat white house beside whose little porch a trellis supported the crucified brown skeleton of a rose-vine; in June this rose-vine bloomed and gave every boy who passed this way ambrosial thoughts of undressing Vera Hummel. Two doors further on was Minor’s Luncheonette. It shared a brick building with the Olinger Post Office. There were two plate-glass windows side by side: behind one of them fat Mrs. Passify, the post mistress, surrounded by Wanted posters and lists of postal regulations, doled out stamps and money-orders; behind the other, wreathed in adolescent smoke and laughter, Minor Kretz, also fat, scooped ice cream and concocted lemon Pepsis. The two establishments were symmetrically set up. Minor’s butterscotch-marble counter mirrored, through the dividing wall, Mrs. Passify’s barred windows and linoleum weighing-counter. As a child, I used to peek through the Local slot into the rear of the post office, seeing racks of sorted letters, stacked gray sacks, and one or two post men in blue pants, hats and coats off, engaging in an official-seeming clatter. Likewise, to me as a child, the older teen agers in the luncheonette seemed to slump in the back booths behind a screen of smoke whose slots permitted glimpses of a mysterious privacy as utterly forbidden to me as if by federal law. The pinball machine and the cancellation machine were twins of noise; where in the post office there was a small shelf bearing a dirty ruffle-edged blotter, a few splayed pens, and two dried bottles with gimcrack hinged mouths, in the luncheonette there was a small table offering for sale plastic cigarette cases, miniature gilt picture frames containing washed-out photographs of June Allyson and Yvonne de Carlo, playing cards with kittens and Scot-ties and cottages and lagoons on the back, and depraved 29# items like transparently loaded dice, celluloid pop eyes and buck teeth, dribble glasses, and painted plaster dog turds. Here you could buy, 2 for 5#, sepia postcards of the Olinger Town Hall, the business strip of the Alton Pike decked out with overhead lights and plywood candles for Christmas, the view from Shale Hill, the new water-chlorinating plant way up above Cedar Top, and the town Honor Roll, looking as it did during the war-of wood and always being newly lettered-, before they put up the little stone one bearing only the names of those who.had died. Here you could buy these cards, and next door, for a penny more, you could mail them; the symmetry, carried right down to the worn spots of the two floors and the heating pipes running along the opposing walls, was so perfect that as a child I had imagined that Mrs. Passify and Minor Kretz were secretly married. At night, and on Sunday mornings, when their windows were dark, the mirroring membrane between them dissolved and, filling the unified brick shell with one fat shopworn sigh, they meshed.

Here my father halted. In the brittle air his shoes scratched on the cement and his mouth moved like a puppet’s. “O.K., Peter,” he said. “You go into Minor’s and I’ll come back and pick you up when Doc Appleton’s done with me.”

“What do you think he’ll tell you?” I was tempted. Penny might be in the luncheonette.

“He’ll tell me I’m as healthy as a dumb old horse,” my father said, “and he’s as wise as a dirty old owl.”

“You don’t want me to come with you?”

“What can you do, you poor kid? Stay away and don’t depress yourself. Go see your friends, whoever the hell they think they are. I never had any friends, so I can’t imagine it.”

My conscience and my father were rarely on opposite sides; I compromised. “I’ll go in here,” I said. “For a minute, then I’ll catch up.”

“Take your time,” he said, with a sudden sweeping motion of his hand, as if remembering that unseen audience before which he was an actor. “You got lots of time to kill. At your age I had so much time to kill my hands are still bloody.” His talk was unreeling wider and wider; I felt chilled.

Walking off alone, he seemed lightened and looked thinner. Perhaps all men look thinner from the back. I wished that for my sake he would buy a respectable coat. As I watched, he took the knit cap out of his pocket and put it on his head; pierced by embarrassment, I ran up the steps, bucked the door, and plunged into the luncheonette.

It was a maze, Minor’s place. So many bodies: yet only a tiny section of the school ever came here. Others had other places; the set at Minor’s was the most criminal and it thrilled me to be, however marginally, a part of it. I felt in this clouded interior a powerful secret lurking, whose nostrils exhaled the smoke and whose hide exuded the warmth. The voices jostling in the stable-warmth all seemed to be gossiping about the same thing, some event that had happened in the minute before I arrived; I was haunted at that age by the suspicion that a wholly different world, gaudy and momentous, was enacting its myths just around the corners of my eyes. I pushed my way through the bodies as if through the leaves of a close-set series of gates. I picked my way past one, two, three booths and there, yes, there, she was. She.

Why is it, love, that faces we love look upon each re-meeting so fresh, as if our hearts have in this instant again minted them? How can I describe her to you justly? She was small and not unusual. Her lips were too plump and irksomely self-satisfied; her nose rather cursory and nervous. Her eyelids were vaguely Negroid, heavy, puffy, bluish, and incongruously worldly-wise when taken with the startled grassy innocence of her eyes. I believe it was these incongruities-between lips and nose, eyes and lids-these soft and silent clashes like the reticulating ripples hinting in the flow of a stream of irregular depths, that made her beauty for me; this delicate irresolution of feature held out the possibility of her being worthy of me. And made her seem always a bit unexpected. She was occupying one side of a booth and there was space beside her. Across the table, two ninth-graders she dimly knew, a girl and a boy, were tugging at each other’s buttons, blind to everything. She was gazing at them and did not see me until my body, easing in, pushed hers. “Peter!” I unbuttoned my pea jacket so the devil-may-care flame of my shirt showed. “Give me a cigarette.”

“Where have you been all day?”

“Here and there. I’ve seen you.” Nicely she tapped one of her Luckies from her purple-and-yellow plastic case, which had a little sliding door that opened and shut. She looked at me with flecked green irises whose perfect circles of black seemed dilated. I did not understand my ability to dissolve her composure and in my heart honestly took no credit for it. But her dissolution was welcome to me; it couched a kind of repose I had never known before. As a baby wishes to be put to bed, my hand wished to be between her thighs. I dragged and in haled. “I had a dream about you last night.” She looked away, as if to give herself space in which to blush, “What did you dream?”

“Not quite what you think,” I said. “I dreamed you turned into a tree, and I called ‘Penny, Penny, come back!’, but you didn’t, and I was leaning my face against the bark of a tree.”

She took it a bit dryly, saying, “Why how sad.”

“It was sad. Everything around me is sad these days.”

“What else is sad?”

“My father thinks he’s sick.”

“What does he think he has?”

“I don’t know. Cancer?”

“Really?”

My cigarette was stirring in me its mixture of nausea and giddiness; I wanted to put it out but instead, for her sake, inhaled. The booth partition across from us leaped a foot closer and the girl and the boy had fallen to bumping heads, like a pair of doped rams.

“Sweetie,” Penny said to me. “Your father’s probably all right. He’s not very old.”

“He’s fifty,” I said. “He just turned fifty last month. He always said he’d never live to be fifty.”

She frowned in thought, my poor dumb little girl, and tried to find some words to comfort me, who was so in finitely ingenious at evading comfort. At last she told me, “Your father’s too funny to die.” A ninth-grader, she only had him as a teacher in study-hall; but the whole school of course knew my father.

“Everybody dies,” I told her.

“Yes, but not for a long time.”

“Yes, but at some point that time has to become now.” And with this we carried the mystery to the far rim, and could only return.

“Has he seen a doctor?” she asked, and, as impersonally as an act of weather, her thigh under the table had become tangent to mine.

“That’s where he is now.” I shifted my cigarette to my right hand and casually dropped, as if to scratch an itch, my freed left hand onto my thigh. “I should be with him,” I told Penny, wondering if my profile looked as elegant as it felt, jut-lipped under a plume of smoke.

“Why? What could you do?”

“I don’t know. Be of some comfort. Just be there.” As naturally as water slips from higher to lower my fingers moved to her thigh from my own. Her skirt had a faunish weave.

This touch, though she did not acknowledge it, interrupted the flow of her thought. She brought out jaggedly, “How can you? You’re just his child.”

“I know,” I said, speaking quickly lest she think my touch was more than an accident, an incident of innocent elements. Having gained my place, I expanded it, fanning my fingers, flattening my palm against the yielding solid. “But I’m the only kid he has.” My using my father’s word “kid” brought him too close; his wrinkling squint, his forward leaning anxiety seemed to loom in the unquiet air. “I’m the only person in the world he can talk to.”

“That can’t be,” she said very softly, in a voice more intimate than the words. “Your father has hundreds of friends.”

“No” I said, “He has no friends; they don’t help him. He just told me.” And with something like the questing fear that made my father, in conversations with strangers, gouge deeper than courtesy found common, my hand, grown enormous, seized the snug wealth of her flesh so completely my fingers probed the crevice between her thighs and my little finger perhaps, touched through the muffle of faun-feeling cloth the apex where they joined, the silken crotch, sacred.

“Peter, no,” she said, still softly, and her cool fingertips took my wrist and replaced my hand on my own leg. I slapped my thigh and sighed, well-satisfied. I had dared more than I had dreamed. So it surprised me as needless and in a shy way whorish when she added in a murmur, “All these people.” As if chastity needed an outer explanation; as if, if we were alone, the earth would sweep up and imprison my forearms.

I stubbed out my cigarette and pleaded, “I must go after him.” I asked her, “Do you pray?”

“Pray?”

“Yes.”

“Yes.”

“Will you pray for him? My father.”

“All right.”

“Thank you. You’re good.” We both looked back amazed at what we had said. I wondered if I had been guilty of blasphemy, using God as a tool with which to score myself the deeper on this girl’s heart. But no, I decided, her promise to pray did genuinely lighten my burden. Rising, I asked her, “Are you coming to the basketball game tomorrow night?”

“I could.”

“Shall I save you a seat?”

“If you like.”

“Or you save me one.”

“All right. Peter.”

“Huh?”

“Don’t worry so much. Not everything is your fault.”

Now the couple opposite us, classmates of Penny’s, whose names were Bonnie Leonard and Richie Lorah, came out of their nudging trance. In a burst of derisive triumph Richie yelled at me, “The Pumpkin Eater!” Bonnie feeble mindedly laughed, and the air of the place, where I had felt so secure, became dangerous with words aimed at my face. Senior boys sporting adult pockets of shadow under their eyes called to me, “Hey, Eater, how’s your old man? How’s Georgie Porgie puddin’ ‘n’ pie?” Once a student had had my father, he did not forget it, and the memory seemed to seek shape in mockery. An emotion of fermented guilt and fondness would seek to purge itself upon me, the petty receptacle of a myth. I hated it and yet it did give me importance; being Caldwell’s son lifted me from the faceless mass of younger children and made me, on my father’s strength alone, exist in the eyes of these Titans. I had only to listen and seem to smile as sweetly cruel memories tumbled from them:

“He used to lie down in the aisle and holler, ‘Come on, walk all over me, you will anyway’…”

“… about six of us filled our pockets up with horse-chestnuts…”

“… seven minutes to the hour everybody stood up and stared as if his fly was open…”

“Christ, I’ll never forget…”

“…this girl in the back of the class said she couldn’t see the decimal point…he went to the window and scooped some snow off the sill and made a ball… hard as hell at the fucking blackboard…”

“ ‘Now can you see it?’ he said.”

“Christ, what a character.”

“You got a great father there, Peter.”

These ordeals usually ended with some such unctuous benediction. It thrilled me, coming from these tall criminals, who smoked in the lavatories, drank hooch in Alton, and visited Philadelphia whorehouses staffed by Negro women. My obliging laugh stiffly dried on my face and, suddenly contemptuous, they turned their backs. I rethreaded my way to the front of the luncheonette. Someone in the booths was imitating a rooster. In the jukebox Doris Day was singing “Sentimental Journey.” From the rear a chorus of cheers rhythmically rose as the pinball machine, gonging in protest, gave up one free game after another. I looked back and through the crush saw that it was Johnny Dedman doing the playing; there was no mistaking those broad, faintly fat shoulders, the turned-up collar of the canary-yellow corduroy shirt, the baroque head of wavy hair crying for a haircut and scooped behind into a wet ducktail. Johnny Dedman was one of my idols. A senior flunked back into a junior, he per formed exquisitely all the meaningless deeds of coordination, jitterbugging and playing pinball and tossing salted nuts into his mouth. By an accident of alphabetization he sat next to me in one study hall and taught me a few tricks, how to ‘make a wooden popping noise by pulling my finger from my mouth, for instance-though I could never do it as loudly as he. He was inimitable and no doubt it was foolish to try. He had a rosy babyish face and a feathery mustache of pale unshaven hair and an absolute purity of ambitionlessness: even his misbehavior was carried forward without any urgency or stridence. He did have a criminal record: once in Alton, wild on beer at the age of sixteen, he had struck a policeman. But I felt he had not sought this out but rather fell into it coolly, as he seemed on the dance floor to fall into the steps that answered his partner and made her, hair flying, cheeks glowing, ass switching, swing. The pinball machine never tilted on him; he claimed he could feel the mercury swaying in the Tilt trigger. He played the machines as if he had invented them. Indeed, his one known connection with the world of hard facts was an acknowledged mechanical ability. Outside of Industrial Arts, he consistently got E’s. There was something sublime in the letter that took my breath away. In that year, the year I was fifteen, if I had not wanted so badly to be Vermeer, I would have tried to be Johnny Dedman. But of course I had the timid sense to see that you do not will to be Johnny Dedman; you fall into it at birth, ripe from the beginning.

Outdoors I turned the points of my wide jacket collar against my throat and walked up the Alton pike two blocks to Doc Appleton’s office. The trolley car released from waiting at the turnout by the trolley that was going westward into Alton as my father and I left the school swayed up the pike, full of gray workers and standing shoppers coming home, going eastward toward Ely, the tiny town at the end of the line. I had lost perhaps ten minutes. I hurried and, having told Penny to pray, prayed Let him live, let him live, do not let my father be sick. The prayer was addressed to all who would listen; in concentric circles it widened, first, into the town, and, beyond, into the hemisphere of sky, and, beyond that, into what was beyond. The sky behind the eastward houses already was purple; above, it was still deep daylight blue; and behind me the sky beyond the houses was aflame. The sky’s blue was an optical illusion that, though described to me in General Science class by my father himself, my mind could only picture as an accumula tion of lightly tinted crystal spheres, as two almost invisibly pink pieces of cellophane will together make rose; add a third, you have red; a fourth, crinkling crimson; and a fifth, such a scarlet as must blaze in the heart of the most ardent furnace. If the blue dome beyond the town was an illusion, how much more, then, of an illusion might be what is beyond that. Please, I added to my prayer, like a reminded child.

Doc Appleton’s house, which had his office and waiting-room in the front part, was a custard-colored stucco set deep on a raised lawn sustained by a sandstone wall a little less than my height. On either side of the steps up to the lawn there were two stone posts topped by large concrete balls, a device of exterior decoration common in Olinger but rare, I have since discovered, elsewhere. Abruptly, as I raced up the sloping walk toward the doctor’s door, all the lamps in the homes of the town began to burn-as in a painting the slight deepening of a shade will make the adjacent color glow. The broad line between day and night in this instant had been crossed.

please ring and walk in. Since I was not myself a patient, I did not ring. I imagined that somehow if I did, Doc Appleton’s accounts would be thrown off, like a check book with an uncashed check from it. In the vestibule of his house there was a cocoa mat and an immense stucco umbrella stand ornamented, higgledy-piggledy, with chips of colored glass. Above the umbrella stand hung a small dark print, frightful to look at, of some classical scene of violence.

The horror of the spectators was so conscientiously dramatized, the jumble of their flung arms and gaping mouths rendered with such an intensity of scratching, the effect of the whole so depressing and dead, that I could never bring myself to focus on what the central event was-my impression was vaguely of a flogging. In the corner of the print, before I snapped my head away as if from the initial impact of pornography, I glimpsed a thick line-a whip?-snaking about a tiny temple etched with spidery delicacy to indicate distance. That some forgotten artist in an irrevocable sequence of hours had labored, doubtless with authentic craft and love, to produce this ugly, dusty, browned, and totally ignored representation seemed to contain a message for me which I did not wish to read. I went into Doc Appleton’s waiting-room on my right. Here old oak furniture padded in cracked black leather lined the walls and encircled a central table laden with battered copies of Liberty and The Saturday Evening Post. A three-legged coat rack like a gaunt witch glowered in one corner and the shelf above its shoulder supported a stuffed crow gone gray with dust. The waiting-room was empty; the door of the consulting-room was ajar and I heard my father’s voice asking, “Could it be hydra venom?”

“Just a minute, George. Who came in?”

With the broad bald face of a yellowish owl Doc Appleton peered out of his office. “Peter,” he said, and like a ray of sunlight the old man’s kindness and competence pierced the morbid atmosphere of his house. Though Doc Appleton delivered me, I first remembered him from a time when I was in the third grade and, worried about my parents’ fights, bullied by older boys coming back from school, ridiculed at recess for my skin whose spots under the stress had spread to my face, I came down with a cold that did not go away. We were poor and therefore slow to call a doctor. On the third day of my fever they called him. I remember I was propped up on two pillows in my parents’ great double bed. The wallpaper and bedposts and picture books on my covers beside me all wore that benevolent passive flatness that comes with enough fever; no matter how I wiped and swallowed, my mouth stayed dry and my eyes stayed moist. Sharp footsteps disciplined the stairs and a fat man wearing a brown vest and carrying a fat brown bag entered with my mother. He glanced at me and turned to my mother and in an acid country voice asked, “What have you been doing to this child?”

There were two strange facts about Doc Appleton: he was a twin, and like me he had psoriasis. His twin was Hester Appleton, who taught Latin and French at the high school. She was a shy thick-waisted spinster, smaller than her brother and gray-haired whereas he was bald. But their brief hook noses were identical and the resemblance was plain. The idea, when I was a child, of these two stately elderly people having popped together from the same mother had an inexhaustible improbability that made them both seem still, in part, infants. Hester lived with the doctor in this house. He had married but his wife had died or disappeared years ago under dark circumstances. He had had a son, Skippy, years older than I but like me an only child; my father had had him in school and the boy had gone on to become a surgeon somewhere in the Midwest, in Chicago, St. Louis, or Omaha.’ Across the mysterious fate of Skippy’s mother there lay this further shadow: Doc Appleton be longed to no church, neither Reformed nor Lutheran, and believed, they said, in nothing. This third strange fact I had picked out of the air. The second, his psoriasis, my mother had revealed to me; until I was born only he and she in the town had been blighted by it. It had kept him, my mother said, from becoming a surgeon, for when the time came for him to roll up his sleeves, the pink scabs would be revealed and the patient on the table in fright might cry, “Physician, heal thyself!” It was a pity, my mother thought, for in her opinion Doc Appleton’s great talent lay in his hands, was manipulative rather than diagnostic. She often described how he had painted and cured a chronic sore throat of hers with one fierce expert swab of a long cotton-tipped stick. She seemed to have thought, at one time in her life, a lot about Doc Appleton.

Now he stooped toward me in the dimness of his waiting-room, his pale round face straining to focus on my brow. He said, “Your skin looks fair.”

“It’s not too bad yet,” I said. “It’s worst in March and April.”

“Very little on your face,” he said. I had thought there was none. He seized my hands-I felt that fierce sureness of touch my mother had felt-and studied my fingernails in the light filtering from the brighter room. “Yes,” he said, “Stippled. Your chest?”

“Pretty bad,” I said, frightened I would have to show him.

He blinked massively and dropped my hands. He was wearing a vest but not a coat and his shirtsleeves above the elbow were clipped by black elastics like narrow bands of mourning. A gold watch-chain formed a shifting pendulous arc across the brown vest of his belly. He wore a stethoscope around his neck. He switched on a light, and an overhead chandelier of brown and orange glass held together by black leading plunged pools of shine onto the wash of magazines on the central table. “You read, Peter, while I finish with your Dad.”

From the consulting-room my father’s voice earnestly called, “Let the kid come in, Doc. I want him to hear what you have to tell me. Whatever happens to me, happens to him.”

I was shy of entering, for fear of finding my father un dressed. But he was fully clothed and sitting on the edge of a small hard chair with stenciled Dutch designs. In this bright room his face looked blanched by shock. His skin looked loose; his little smile had spittle in the corners. “No matter what happens to you in life, kid,” he said to me, “I hope you never come up against the sigmoidoscope. Brrough!”

“Tcha,” Doc Appleton grunted, and lowered his weight into his desk chair, a revolving and pivoting one that seemed to have been contoured for him. His short plump arms with their efficient white hands perched familiarly on the accustomed curve of the carved wooden arms, which culminated in an inner scroll. “Your trouble, George,” he said, “is you have never come to terms with your own body.” To be out of their way, I sat on a high white metal stool beside a table of surgical tools.

“You’re right,” my father said. “I hate the damn ugly thing. I don’t know how the hell it got me through fifty years.”

Doc Appleton removed the stethoscope from around his neck and laid it on his desk, where it writhed and then subsided like a slain rubber serpent. His desk was a wide old rolltop full of bills, pill envelopes, prescription pads, cartoons clipped from magazines, empty phials, a brass letter opener, a blue box of loose cotton, and an omega-shaped silver clamp. His sanctum had two parts: this, the one where his desk, his chairs, his table of surgical tools, his scales, his eye-chart, and his potted plants were situated, and, be yond his desk and a partition of frosted glass, the other, the innermost sanctum, where his medicines were stored on shelves like bottles of wine and jugs of jewels. To here he would retire at the end of a consultation, emerging in time with a little labeled bottle or two, and from here at all times issued a complex medicinal fragrance compounded of candy, menthol, ammonia, and dried herbs. This cloud of healing odor could be sniffed even in the vestibule that contained the mat, the print, and the stucco umbrella stand. The doctor pivoted in his swivel chair and faced us; his bald head was not like Minor Kretz’s, which declared in its glittering knobs the plates and furrows of his skull. Doc Appleton’s was a smooth luminous rise of skin lightly flecked with a few pinker spots that only I, probably, would have noticed and recognized as psoriasis.

He pointed his thumb at my father. “You see, George,” he said, “you believe in the soul. You believe your body is like a horse you get up on and ride for a while and then get off. You ride your body too hard, You show it no love. This is not natural. This builds up nervous tension.”

My stool was uncomfortable and Doc Appleton’s philosophizing always afflicted me with embarrassment. I deduced that the verdict had already been handed down and from the fact that the doctor felt leisure to be boring I deduced that the verdict had been favorable. Still I remained in some suspense and studied the table of wiggly probes and angled scissors as if they were an alphabet in which I could read the word. AI AI, they said. Among these silver exclamations -needles and arrows and polished clamps-there was that strange hammer for tapping your knee to make your leg jerk. It was a heavy triangle of red rubber fixed in a silver handle made concave to improve the doctor’s grip. My very first trips to this office that I could remember centered about that hammer, and the table of instruments took its center from this arrowhead of sullen orange as if from something very ancient. It was the shape of an arrowhead but also of a fulcrum and as I watched it it seemed to sink, sink with its infinitesimal cracks and roundnesses of use and age, sink down through time and to be at the bottom sufficiently simple and ponderous to make there a pivot for everything.

“…know thyself, George,” Doc Appleton was saying. His pink firm palm, round as a child’s, lifted in admonition. “Now how long have you been teaching?”

“Fourteen years,” my father said. “I was laid off late in ‘31 and was out of work the whole year the kid was born. In the summer of ‘33, AI Hummel, who as you know is Pop Kramer’s nephew, came up to the house and suggested-”

“Does your father enjoy teaching? Peter.”

It took me a second to realize I had been addressed. “I don’t know,” I said, “at times I suppose.” Then I thought and added, “No, I guess he doesn’t.”

“It’d be O. K.,” my father said, “if I thought I was any good at it. But I don’t have the gift of discipline. My father, the poor devil, didn’t have it either.”

“You’re not a teacher,” Doc Appleton told him. “You’re a learner. This creates tension. Tension creates excess gastric juice. Now George, the symptoms you describe might be merely mucinous colitis. Constant irritation of the digestive track can produce pain and the sensation of anal fullness you describe. Until the X-ray, we’ll assume that’s what it is.”

“I wouldn’t mind plugging ahead at something I wasn’t any good at,” my father said, “if I knew what the hell the point of it all was. I ask, and nobody’ll tell me.”

“What does Zimmerman say?”

“He doesn’t say a thing. He thrives on confusion. Zimmerman has the gift of discipline and us poor devils under him who don’t have it, he just laughs at us. I can hear him laughing every time the clock ticks.”

“Zimmerman and myself,” Doc Appleton said, and sighed, “have never seen eye to eye. I went to school with him, you know.”

“I didn’t know that.”

My father was.lying. Even I had known that, Doc Apple-ton said it so often. Zimmerman was a chafe to him, a lifelong sore point. I was furious with my father for being so obsequious, for laying us both open this way to a long and often-chewed story.

“Why, yes,” Doc Appleton said, blinking in surprise that my father should be ignorant of such a famous fact. “We went all through the Olinger schools together.” He leaned back in the chair that fitted him so exquisitely. “Now when we were born here it wasn’t called Olinger, it was called Til den, in honor of the man who got cheated out of the election. Old Pappy Olinger was still farming all that land to the north of the pike and east of where the cardboard box factory is now. I remember seeing him take his team into Alton, a little old fella not five feet tall with a black hat and a mustache you could have wiped your table silver on. He had three sons: Cot, who went crazy one night and killed two steer with a hand hoe, Brian, who had a child by the Negro woman they had to work in the kitchen, and Guy, the youngest, who sold the land to the real estate developers and died of trying to eat the money up. Cot, Brian, and Guy: they’re all beneath the ground now. Now what did I start to say?”

“About you and Mr. Zimmerman,” I said.

My impudent impatience was not lost on him; he looked over my father’s shoulder at me and his lower lip slid thought fully to one side and then to the other. “Ah, yes,” he pronounced, and spoke to my father. “Well, Louis and I went through the grades together when they were scattered all over the borough. First and second grade was over by Pebble Creek where they put the parking lot for the new diner; third and fourth grades were in Mrs. Eberhardt’s barn that she rented the town for a dollar a year; fifth and sixth were in a stone building on what they used to call the Black Acres, because the loam was so deep, over beyond where the race track used to be. Whenever they’d hold a weekday race, on Tuesdays usually, they used to let us out of class because they needed boys to hold and comb the horses. Then for those that kept on past sixth grade, by the time I was the age they had built the high school at the Elm Street corner. Now didn’t that look grand to’ us then! That’s the building, Peter, where you went to elementary school.”

“I didn’t know that,” I said, trying to atone for my rudeness before.

Doc Appleton seemed pleased. He relaxed into his creaking chair so deeply his creased high-top shoes dangled, just touching their toes to the threadbare carpet. “Now Louis M. Zimmerman,” he went on, “was a month older than myself, and a great hand with the girls and the old women. Mrs. Mettzler, that was our teacher in the first and second grade, a woman not an inch under six feet tall and with legs like the siding slats of a tobacco shed, took a shine to Louis, and for that matter so did Miss Leet and Mrs. Mabry that followed her; all his way through school Louis had the best of attention, while of course nobody thought a second thought about an ugly duckling like Harry Appleton. Louis always had that edge. You see: he was quick.”

“You said a mouthful,” my father said. “He’s always a jump ahead of me, I’ll tell you that.”

“He never had, you see,” Doc Appleton continued, making curious ambiguous motions with his plump scrubbed hands, pressing the palms together, lightly chopping the knuckles of one hand with the edge of the other, “the adversity. He always knew success and never developed the character. So he spreads, you see,” and his white fingers crabbed through the air, “like a cancer. He’s not a man to trust, though he gives the Bible lesson every Sunday up at the Reformed. Tcha. If he was a tumor, George, I’d take a knife”-he shifted his hand and held up his thumb and it did seem very stiff and sharp-”and cut him out.” And his thumb, sickle-shaped backwards with pressure, scooped a curt divot out of the air.

“I appreciate your being frank with me, Doc,” my father said, “but me and those other poor devils up at the high school are stuck with him forever as far as I can see. Three out of four people in this town swear by him-they worship that man.”

“People are foolish,” Doc Appleton said, and lurched forward in his chair so that his feet softly plopped on the carpet. “That’s one thing you learn in the practice of medicine. People are by and large very foolish.” He tapped my father’s knee once, twice, three times before continuing. His voice assumed a confidential wheeze. “Now when I went to medical school down at Penn,” he said, “they thought, you know, a country boy, dumb. After that first year they weren’t saying so dumb any more. It might be I was a little slower than some but I had the character. I took my time and learned the books. When the class graduated, who do you think was at the head? Heh, Peter-you’re a bright boy. Who do you think?”

“You,” I said. I didn’t want to say it but the word was forced from me. That’s how those Olinger bigwigs were.

Doc Appleton looked at me without nodding or smiling or in any way showing that he had heard. Then he looked into my father’s face, nodded, and said, “I wasn’t at the head, but I was up there pretty well. I did all right for a country boy supposed to be dumb. George, have you been listening to what I’ve been saying?” And without warning, in that strange way monologuists have of ending a conversation as if their time has been wasted, he got up and went into his inner sanctum and made tinkling noises out of sight. He returned with a small bottle of cherry-colored fluid that from the way it danced and gleamed seemed more mercurial than liquid. He pressed the bottle into my father’s wart-freckled hand and said, “A tablespoon every three hours. Until we have the X-rays we won’t know any more than we know now. Get rest and don’t think. Without death, now, there couldn’t be life. Health,” he said with a little smiling roll of his lower lip, “is an animal condition. Now most of our ill-health comes from two places-the brain and the back. We made two mistakes; one was to stand up and the other was to start thinking. It strains the spine and the nerves. It makes tension and the brain makes the body.” He angrily strode toward me and roughly pressed my hair back from my forehead and stared intensely at my brow. “You’re not as bad on your scalp as your mother,” he said, and released me. I flattened my hair forward again, humiliated and dazed.

“Do you hear from Skippy?” my father asked. All fierceness and shimmer left the doctor; he became a heavy old man in a vest and fastened shirtsleeves. “He’s on a staff in St. Louis,” he said.

“You’re too modest to say it,” my father told him, “but I bet you’re prouder than hell of him. I know I am; next to my own son he was the best student I ever had and not too much of my thickheadedness seemed to rub off on him, thank God.”

“He has his mother’s graces,” Doc Appleton said after a pause, and a pall had fallen. The waiting-room seemed long deserted and the black leather furniture depressed and dented by the shadows of mourners. Our voices and footsteps felt lost in dust and I felt viewed from thousands of years in the future. My father offered to pay. The doctor waved his dollars aside, saying, “We’ll wait till the end of the story.”

“You’re a straight-shooter and I’m grateful,” my father said.

Outside, in the gnashing, black, brilliantly alive cold, my father said to me, “See, Peter? He didn’t tell me what I want to know. They never do.”

“What happened before I came?”

“He put me through the mill and made an X-ray appointment at Homeopathic in Alton for six o’clock tonight.”

“What does that mean?”

“You never know with Doc Appleton what he means.

That’s how he keeps his reputation.”

“He doesn’t seem to like Zimmerman but I couldn’t make out exactly why.”

“The story there, Peter, is that Zimmerman-I guess you’re old enough to say this to-Zimmerman’s supposed to have made love to Doc Appleton’s wife. It happened if it happened at all before you were born. There was even supposed to be some doubt as to who Skippy’s father was.”

“But where’s Mrs. Appleton now?”

“Nobody knows where she went. She’s either alive or dead.”

“What was her name?”

“Corinna.”

Alive or dead, made love, before you were born-these phrases, each rich with mystery, rendered the night brimming around us terribly deep, and from beyond the far rim like an encircling serpent my father’s death seemed to tighten its coil. The darkness that above the heads of the houses swept past the stars and enclosed them like flecks of mica in an ocean seemed great enough to contain even this most mighty of impossible events. I chased him, his profile pale and grim in streetlight, and like a ghost he kept always a step ahead of me. He put on his cap and my head was cold.

“What are we going to do?” I called after him.

“We’ll drive into Alton,” he said. “I’ll get my X-ray at

the Homeopathic and then I’ll go across the street to the

Y.M.C.A. I want you to go to the movies. Get in where it’s warm and come up to the Y afterwards. That should be about seven-thirty or quarter to eight. The meet should be over by eight. It’s about quarter after five now. Do you have enough money for a hamburg?”

“Sure, I guess. Hey. Daddy. How are your aches and pains?”

“Better, Peter. Don’t worry about me. One nice thing about having a simple mind, you can only think about one pain at a time.”

“There ought to be some way,” I said, “to make you healthy.”

“Kill me,” my father said. The sentence sounded strange, outdoors, in the dark and cold, coming from above, as his face and body hurried forward. “That’s the cure-all,” he said. “Kill me.”

We walked west to where the car had been left on the school parking lot and got into it and drove into Alton. Lights, there were lights on both sides solidly supporting us for the full three miles, except for the void on the right that was the poorhouse corn fields and for the interval in which we crossed the Running Horse River over the bridge where the hitchhiker had seemed to lift into the air on his long-heeled shoes. We cut through the gaudy heart of the city, across Riverside Drive, up Pechawnee Avenue, into Weiser Street and Conrad Weiser Square, up Sixth, across the railroad station parking lot, and down an alley only my father seemed to know about. The alley led us to where the railroad embankment widened into a black shoulder sparkling with cinders, near the Essick’s coughdrop plant, which flooded the whole sinister area with its sickly-sweet fumes. The Essick’s employees used this leftover sloping bit of railroad property as a parking lot, and so my father used it now. We got out. The slams of our doors echoed. The shape of our car sat on its shadow like a frog looking into a mirror. It was alone on the lot. A blue light overhead kept watch like a cold angel.

My father and I parted by the railroad station. He walked left, toward the hospital. I walked on, to Weiser Street, where five movie theatres advertised their shows. The downtown crowds were streaming home. The matinees were dismissed; the stores, their windows proclaiming January White Sales and drifted deep with cotton sheets, were stringing pad locked chains across their doors; the restaurants were in the lull of setting up the tables for dinner; the old men with the soft-pretzel carts draped them with tarpaulins and pushed them away. The city excited me most at this hour, when my father abandoned me and I, a single cross-current in the tidal exodus, strolled homeless, free to gaze into jewellers’ windows, to eavesdrop at the mouths of cigar stores, to inhale the breath of pastry shops where fat ladies in rimless spectacles and white smocks sighed behind bright trays of bear-claws, sticky buns, glazed doughnuts, pecan rolls, and shoo-fly pies. At this hour when the workers and shoppers of the city were hurrying by foot, bus, car, and trolley home to their duties, I was for a time released from mine, not merely permitted but positively instructed by my father to go to a movie and spend two hours out of this world. The world, my world with all its oppressive detail of pain and inconsequence was behind me; I wandered among caskets of jewels which would someday be mine. Frequently at this moment, my luxurious space of freedom all before me, I thought guiltily of my mother, helpless at her distance to control me or protect me, my mother with her farm, her father, her dissatisfaction, her exhausting alternations of recklessness and prudence, wit and obtuseness, transparence and opacity, my mother with her wide tense face and strange innocent scent of earth and cereal, my mother whose blood I was polluting in the gritty inebriation of Alton’s downtown. Then I would seem smothered in a rotten brilliance and become very frightened. But my guilt could not be eased, I could not go to her, for of her own will she had placed ten miles between us; and this rejection on her part made me veng ful, proud, and indifferent: an inner Arab.

The five movie palaces of Weiser Street in Alton were Loew’s, the Embassy, the Warner, the Astor, and the Ritz. I went to the Warner and saw “Young Man with a Horn,” starring Kirk Douglas, Doris Day, and Lauren Bacall. As my father had promised, it was warm inside. My best piece of luck for the day, I came in on the cartoon. The day was the thirteenth of the month so I did not expect it to be lucky. The cartoon was, of course, a Bugs Bunny. Loew’s had Tom and Jerry, the Embassy Popeye, the Astor either Disney, the best, or Paul Terry, the worst. I bought a box of popcorn and a box of Jordan Almonds, though both were bad for my skin. The sidelights were soft yellow and time melted. At the end, when the hero, the trumpeter who was based upon Bix Beiderbecke, had finally fought free of the rich woman who with her insinuating crooked smile (Lauren Bacall) had been corrupting his art, and the good artistic woman (Doris Day), her lover restored to her, sang, and behind her own trans parent voice Harry James’s trumpet pretending to be Kirk Douglas’s lifted like a silver fountain higher and higher into “With a Song in My Heart”-only here, on the last note, an absolutely level ecstasy attained, did I remember my father. An urgent sense of being late caught me up.

The sidelights turned bright. I fled from my seat. In the floor-to-ceiling mirrors that lined the sloping glaring lobby I saw myself full-length, flushed, pink-eyed, the shoulders of my flaming shirt drenched with the white flakes I had scratched from my scalp in the dark. It was a habit of mine to scratch when unseen. I brushed my shoulders wildly and on the cold street was startled by the real faces, which seemed meager and phantasmal after the great glowing planetary visions I had been watching slowly collide, merge, part, and recombine. I ran toward the Y.M.C.A. It was two blocks up from Weiser Street, at Perkiomen and Beech. I ran along the railroad tracks. The narrow pavement was lined with small bars and shut barber parlors. The sky was an un steady yellow above the tenements and even at the zenith paleness drained stars from the night. The smell of cough-drops coming from a distance mocked my panic. The perfect city, the city of the future, seemed remote and irrelevant and conceived in cruelty.

The Y.M.C.A. smelled of sneakers and the floor was scuffed gray. At the center desk a Negro boy sat reading a comic book underneath a bulletin board shingled with obsolete posters and bygone tournament results. Far away down a strangely green hall, green as if lit by bulbs shining through grape arbor leaves, a game of billiards studiously muttered. From the other direction drifted the patient ga-glokka, gaglokka of a ping-pong game. The boy behind the desk looked up from his comic book and frightened me; there were no Negroes in Olinger and I was superstitiously timid of them. They seemed to me wizards, possessing the black secrets of love and song. But his face was all innocence, all innocence and the shade of malted milk. “Hi,” I said and, holding my breath, swiftly walked to the passageway that led to the downward flight of concrete that in turn led, through the locker room, to the pool. As I descended, the odors of water and chlorine and a third, as of skin, grew upon me.

In the great tiled chamber where the pool lived, a barking resonance broke everything into fragments. On the little wooden bleachers at the poolside my father sat with a wet and naked boy, Deifendorf. Deifendorf wore only the skimpy black official trunks; the droop of his genitals was limply defined between his spread thighs. Hair flowed down his chest and forearms and legs and a stream of water was running across the wood where his bare feet rested. The curves and flats of his hunched white body were harmonious but for his horny red hands. He and my father greeted me with grins that looked much the same: snaggled, ignorant, conspiratorial. To annoy Deifendorf I asked him, “Ja win the breast stroke and the two-twenty?”

“I won more than you did,” he answered.

“He won the breast stroke,” my father said. “I’m proud of you, Deify. You kept your promise to the best of your ability. That makes you a man.”

“Shit if I’d seen that guy in the far lane I’d’ve taken the two-twenty too. Bastard he sneaked in on me, I thought I’d won it, I was just gliding in.”

“That kid swam a good race,” my father said. “He won it honestly. He paced himself. Foley’s a good coach. If I was any kind of a coach, Deify, you’d be king of the county; you’re a natural. If I was any kind of a coach and you’d give up cigarettes.”

“Fuck I can hold my breath eighty seconds as it is,” Deifendorf said.

There was in their talk a mutual flattery that annoyed me. I sat on the other side of my father and concentrated on the pool: it was the hero here. It filled its great underground cage with staccato glitter and the eye-flagellating stink of chlorine. The reflection of the bleachers across the pool, where the opposing team and the judges sat, made on the rattled water a figment that for split seconds seemed a bearded face. Shattered again and again, the water yet sought with the quickness of crystalline reaction to recompose itself. Shouts and splashes broken by echoes and countersplashes made in collision new words, words of no language I knew, garbled barks that seemed to be answers to a question I had un knowingly asked, cecrops! inachus! da! No, it was not me who had asked the question, but my father beside me.

“What does it feel like to win?” he had asked aloud, speaking straight ahead and thus equally to Deifendorf and me. “Jesus, I’ll never know.”

Flecks and blobs skidded back and forth across the volatile aqua skin. The lines of lane demarcation on the pool bottom looped and wavered, refracted, toward the surface; the bearded face seemed about to constitute itself when, each time, another boy dived. Everything was over but the diving. One of our divers, Danny Horst, a runty senior with a huge mane of black hair that for diving he did up in a hairband like a Greek girl, came forward on the board, muscles swirling, and executed a running forward somersault, knees tucked, toes taut, so perfectly, uncoiling into the water through a soft splash as symmetrical as the handles of a vase, that one of the judges flashed the 10 card.

“In fifteen years,” my father said, “I’ve never seen the ten used before. It’s like saying God has. come down to earth. There is no such thing as perfection.”

“Thatta baby Danny boy,” Deifendorf yelled, and a patter of applause from both teams greeted the diver as he surfaced, tossed his loosened hair with a proud flick, and swam the few strokes to the pool edge. But on his next dive Danny, aware we were all expecting another miracle, tensed up, lost the rhythm of the approach, came out of the one-and-a-half twist a moment too soon, and slapped the water with his back. One judge gave him a 3. The other two gave him 4s. “Well,” my father said, “the poor kid gave it all he had.” And when Danny surfaced this time, my father, and only my father, clapped.

The final score of the meet was West Alton 37 ½, Olinger 18. My father stood at the pool edge and said to his team, “I’m proud of you. You’re damn good sports to come out for this at all-you get no glory and you get no pay. For a town without even an outdoor pool, I don’t see how you do as well as you do. If the high school had its own pool like West Alton does-and I don’t want to take any credit away from them-you’d all be Johnny Weismuellers. In my book, you are already. Danny, that was one beautiful dive. I don’t expect to see a dive like that again as long as I live.”

My father looked strange making this speech, standing so erect in his suit and necktie among the naked torsos; the vibrating turquoise water and beaded cream tiling framed his dark and earnest head as I saw it from the bleachers. Across the listening skin of the shoulders and chests of the team a nervous flicker now and then passed, swiftly as a gust across water, or a tic in the flank of a horse. Though they had lost, the team was boisterous and proud in their flesh, and we left them in the shower room carousing and lathering like a small herd joyfully caught in a squall.

“Practice this Wednesday as usual,” my father had called to them in parting. “Don’t drink any milkshakes or eat more than four hamburgers before you show up.” Everyone laughed, and even I smiled, though my father was a heaviness upon me. In all the events of the night that followed there was this weight and inertia about him that blocked and snagged at every turn my simple plan, which was to get him home, where he would pass out of my care.

As we were walking up the hall from the concrete steps the West Alton coach Foley caught up with us, and the two men talked for what seemed an hour. The damp air around the pool had put their suits out of press, and they seemed in the dimness of the green hall two shepherds soaked in dew. “You’ve done a superhuman job with those boys,” my father told Foley. “If I was one-tenth the coach you are we would have given you a run for your money. I have a few naturals this year.”

“George now, no crap,” Foley replied, a thick sandy man all courtesy and ginger. “You know as well as me there’s no coaching to it; let the tadpoles swim is all you can do. There’s a fish in every one of us, but you have to soak to get him out.”

“That’s good,” my father said. “I never heard that before. Bud, how did you like my big man in the breast stroke?”

“He should have had the two-twenty, too; I hope you burned his ass for letting up like that.”

“He’s dumb, Bud. D-U-M-B. The poor devil has no more brains than I do and I hate to bawl him out.” My throat rasped in sheer pressure of impatience. “You’ve met my son, haven’t you, Bud? Peter, come over here and shake this man’s hand. This is the kind of man you should have had for a daddy.”

“Why hell I know Peter,” Mr. Foley said, and there was something deeply agreeable about his handshake, gritty and warm and easy. “The whole county knows Caldwell ’s boy.”

In their twilit world of Y.M.CA.s and recreational programs and athletic banquets, this sort of wildly congratulatory blarney passed for conversation; I minded it less in Mr. Foley than in my father, whose affectation of it always seemed to me embarrassed.

My father was for all his talk at heart a man of silence. He walked through the events of that night in a mood that has become in my memory silence. Once outside, his mouth made a firm line and his heels gathered in the pavement with a kind of aloof greed. I wonder if any man ever enjoyed walking in the small ugly cities of the East as much as my father. Trenton, Bridgeport, Binghamton, Johnstown, Elmira, Altoona: these were the cities where his work as cable splicer for the telephone company had taken him in the years before and the years just after he married my mother, the years before my birth and Hoover ’s Depression stalled him in the sticks. He feared Firetown and felt uneasy in Olinger but adored Alton; its asphalt and streetlights and tangent facades spoke to him of the great Middle Atlantic civilization, bounded by New Haven in the north and Hagerstown in the south and Wheeling in the west, which was his home in eternal space. To walk beside my father down Sixth Street was to hear the asphalt sing.

I asked him how his X-ray had gone and in answer he asked me if I were hungry. It occurred to me that indeed I was; the popcorn and the Jordan Almonds had settled into a sour aftertaste. We stopped at the trolley-shaped diner beside the Acme’s parking lot. My father conducted himself in the city with a simplicity that was soothing. My mother made too much of a decision of everything, as if she were trying to ex press herself in a foreign language. Just so, in the country my father was confused in action and circuitous in thought. But here, in Alton at quarter after eight o’clock, he handled himself with the deftness, the expertness that is, after all, most of what we hope for from fathers: the door pushed open, the glare and stares calmly blinked down, the two stools located side by side, the menu knowingly plucked from its place between the/ napkin dispenser and the catsup bottle, the counterman addressed without stridence or equivocating, the sandwiches-his a Western egg, mine a toasted ham-consumed in manful silence. My father quietly sucked the three central fingers of his right hand and pinched his lower lip with a paper napkin. “First time I’ve felt like eating in weeks,” he said to me. In conclusion we ordered apple pie for me and coffee for him; the check was a stiff green tab cryptically nipped by a triangular punch. He paid it with one of two dollar bills left in the worn hip wallet that had curved through the years to fit his haunch. As we rose my father noncommittally slipped, with a practiced flick of his wart-freckled hand, two dimes beneath his empty cup. And as an afterthought he bought for 65¢ one of the diner’s ready-made Italian sandwiches. It was to be a present for my mother. There was a vulgar side to my mother which apparently enjoyed smelly slippery Italian sandwiches and to which my father had, I saw jealously, more access than I. He paid for the sandwich with his last dollar and said, “That cleans me out, kid. You and I are penniless orphans.” Swinging the little brown paper bag, he walked us to the car.

The Buick was still alone, brooding on its shadow. Its nose was tipped up the slope, toward the unseen tracks. Menthol like a vaporized moon suffused the icy air. The factory wall was a sheer cliff mixed of brick and black glass. The panes of glass were now and then mysteriously relieved by a pane of cardboard or tin. The brick did not yield its true color to the streetlamp that lit the area but instead showed as a diminution of black, a withdrawn and deadly gray. This same light made the strange gravel here glitter. Compounded of coal chips and cinders, it made a loud and restless earth that never settled, crackling and shifting under foot as if its destiny were to be perpetually raked. Silence encircled us. Not a window looking at us was lit, though deep in the factory a blue glint kept watch. My father and I could have been murdered in this place and until dawn no one would have known. Our bodies would lie in the puddles near the factory wall and our hands and hair would freeze solid into the ice.

The car was slow to start in the cold. Unh-uh, unh-uh, the engine grunted, at first briskly and then more and more slowly, self-discouraged. “Jesus, don’t quit on me now,” my father breathed in a dancing stream of vapor. “Start one more time and tomorrow I’ll get your battery charged.”

Unnh-uh, unnnnnh-ah.

My father switched off the ignition and we sat in the dark. He made a loose fist and blew into it. “See,” I said, “if you’d worn your gloves you’d have ‘em now.”

“You must be frozen to death,” was his answer. “One more time,” he said, and switched the ignition back on and de pressed the starter button with his thumb. In the pause, the battery had gathered a little juice. It commenced hopefully.

Ih-huh, Ih-huh, uh-uh, unnh-uh, unnhn-ah, uhhhh. We scraped the bottom of the battery.

My father pulled the emergency brake a notch tighter, and said to me, “We’re in the soup. We’ll have to try a desperation measure. You get in behind the wheel, Peter, and I’ll get out and push. We have a little slope here but we’re pointed the wrong way. Put the car into reverse. When I shout, let the clutch out. Don’t ease it out, pop it out.”

“Maybe we should get a garageman now, before they close,” I said. I was frightened of failing him.

“Let’s give this a whirl,” he said. “You can do it.”

He got out of the car and I slid over, accidentally sitting on my books and the paper bag containing the Italian sandwich for my mother. My father went to the front of the car and as he stooped to put his weight into it his grinning face burned yellow like a gnome’s. The light of the headlights cut across his face so sharply his forehead seemed all knobs and it was plain how often his nose had been broken when he played football at college thirty years ago. My stomach clenched coldly as I checked the position of the gear shift and ignition switch and choke. At a nod from my father I released the emergency brake. Only the ovoid of his imbecile blue cap showed above the hood as he pitched his weight into the car. It did move backwards. The crunching of the tires on the gravel lifted in pitch; grinding backwards we struck a little declivity that added a precious bit of momentum; the Buick’s inertia for a moment tugged to be free of itself. In a piercing sob my father shouted, “Now!” I popped out the clutch as I had been told to do. The car snapped to a stop jaggedly; but its motion was transferred through crusty knobs and clogged pivots to the engine, which, like a slapped baby, coughed. The motor gasped and shook the frame as its cylinders erratically exploded; I pushed in the choke halfway, trying not to smother it, and jiggled my foot on the accelerator: this was the mistake. Twitched out of tune, the motor missed one, two beats, and died.

We were on the flat. Far away beyond the factory wall the door of a bar opened and a slat of light collapsed into the street.

My father flashed to my door and I lurched over, sickly ashamed. My body burned all over; I needed to urinate. “Son of a bitch,” I said, to distract with my manliness my father from my failure.

“You did O.K., kid,” he said, panting with excitement as he resumed his place behind the wheel. “The engine’s stiff; that may have loosened it up.” Delicately as a safecracker, his black silhouette picked at the dashboard as his foot probed the gas pedal. It had to be on the first try and it was. He found the spark again and nursed it into roaring life. I closed my eyes in thanks and relaxed into the coming motion of the car.

It did not come. Instead, a faint disjointed purr arose from the rear of the chassis, where I imagined the corpses had been carried when the undertaker owned the car. My father’s shadow hurriedly tried all the gears; to each the same faint and unmoving purr answered. He tried each gear twice in disbelief. The motor roared but the car did not move. The factory wall echoed back the frantic sustained crescendo of the cylinders and I was afraid men would be called toward us out of the distant bar.

My father put his arms up on the wheel and lowered his head into them. It was a thing I had only ever seen my mother do. At the height of some quarrel or sadness she would crook her arms on the table and lower her head into them; it frightened me more than any rage, for in the rage you could watch her face.

“Daddy?”

My father did not answer. The streetlight touched with a row of steady flecks the curve of his knit cap: the way Vermeer outlined a loaf of bread.

“What do you think’s wrong?”

Now it occurred to me he had had an “attack” and the in explicable behavior of the car was in fact an illusionistic reflection of some breakage in himself. I was about to touch him-I never touched my father-when he looked up with a smile of sorts on his bumpy and battered urchin’s face. “This is the kind of thing,” he said, “that’s been happening to me all my life. I’m sorry you got involved in it. I don’t know why the damn car doesn’t move. Same reason the swimming team doesn’t win, I suppose.”

He raced the motor again and peered down past his knees at the clutch pedal as he worked it in and out with his foot.

“Do you hear that little rattling behind?” I asked.

He looked up and laughed. “You poor devil,” he said.

“You deserved a winner and you got a loser. Let’s go. If I never see this heap of junk again it’ll be too soon.”

He got out and slammed the door on his side so hard I thought the window might shatter. The black body swayed fastidiously on its obstinate wheels and then sat casting its paper-thin shadow as if it had won some inscrutable point. We walked away. “That’s why I never wanted to move to that farm,” my father said. “As soon as you do you become dependent upon automobiles. All I’ve ever wanted is to be able to walk to where I had to go. My ideal is to walk to my own funeral. Once you’ve sold out your legs, you’ve sold out your life.”

We walked across the railroad station parking lot and then turned left to the Esso station on Boone Street. The pumps were dark but a dim golden light burned in the little office; my father looked in and tapped on the glass. The interior was crowded with raw new tires and spare parts in numbered boxes more or less arranged in a green metal frame. A great upright Coca-Cola dispenser vibrated audibly and trembled and shut off, as if a body trapped inside had made its last effort. The electric Quaker State Oil clock on the wall said 9:06; its second hand swept the full circle as we waited. My father tapped again, and there was still no answer. The only motion within was the second hand sweeping.

I asked, “Isn’t the one on Seventh Street an all-night place?”

He asked me, “How are you bearing up, kid? This is a helluva thing, isn’t it? I ought to call your mother.”

We walked up Boone and across the tracks and past the little porches of the brick row houses and thence up Seventh, across Weiser, which wasn’t so gaudy this high up, to where indeed the great garage was open. Its white mouth seemed to be drinking the night. Within, two men in gray coveralls, wearing gloves from which the fingers had been cut, were washing an automobile with pails of sudsy hot water. They worked quickly, for the water tended to freeze in a film of ice on the metal. The garage was open to the street at one end and at the other end faded into indeterminate caverns of parked cars. Along one wall a little booth, like a broader telephone booth or like one of those enclosed sheds in which people used to wait for trolley cars-there still was one in the town of Ely-, seemed to function as the heart of the place. Outside its door, on a little cement curb stenciled with the words step up, a man in a tuxedo and white muffler waited, periodically consulting the black-dialed platinum watch strapped to the inside of his wrist. His motions were so jerky and chronic that when I first spotted him in the corner of my eye I thought he was a life-size mechanical ad. The car being washed, a pearl-gray Lincoln, was presumably his. My father stood in front of him for an instant and I saw from the quality of the man’s pearl-gray gaze that my father was literally invisible to him.

My father went to the door of the booth and opened it. I had to follow him in. Here a thickset man was busily scrambling a table of papers. He was standing; there was a desk chair to sit in but it was heaped to the arms with papers and pamphlets and catalogues. The man held a clipboard and a smoking cigarette in the same hand and was sucking his teeth as he searched through his papers.

My father said, “I beg your pardon, my friend.”

The manager said, “Just a minute please, give me a break, will ya?” and, angrily wadding a piece of blue paper in his fist, plunged past us out the door. It was much more than a minute before he returned.

To consume the time and conceal my embarrassment I fed a penny into the chewing-gum-ball machine installed by the Alton Kiwanis. I received, the rarest, the prize, a black ball. I loved licorice. So did my father. The time we went to New York my Aunt Alma had told me that in their childhood the other kids in their block of Passaic had called my father Sticks because he was always eating licorice sticks. “Do you want this?” I asked him.

“Oh God,” he said, as if in my palm I was holding out a pill of poison to him. “No thanks, Peter. That would just about finish my teeth on the spot.” And he began, in a way I can hardly describe, to rear and toss in the confined space of our cabin, turning to confront now a rack of road maps, now a detailed chart of spare part code numbers, now a calendar displaying a girl posed only in a snow bunny cap with pink pointed ears, mittens and booties of white fur, and a fluffy round tailpiece. Her bottom was pertly pointed outward at us. My father groaned and pressed his forehead against the restraining glass; the man in the tuxedo turned around, startled at the bump. The men in the fingerless gloves had climbed inside the Lincoln and were wiping the windows with busy swipes like the blur of bees. My father’s freckled fists rummaged blindly among the papers on the table as he strained to see where the manager had disappeared to. Afraid he would disturb a mysterious order, I said sharply, “Daddy. Control yourself.”

“I’ve got the heebie-jeebies, kid,” he answered loudly. “Biff. Bang. I’m ready to smash something. Time and tide for no man wait. This reminds me of death.”

“Relax” I said. “Take off your cap. He probably thinks you’re a panhandler.”

He gave no sign of hearing me; his communion was all with himself. His eyes had turned yellowish; my mother sometimes screamed when that amber gleam began to appear in his eyes. He looked at me with lifesaver irises lit by a ghost’s radiant gaze. His parched lips moved. “I can take anything by myself,” he told me. “But I’ve got you on my hands.”

“I’m all right” I snapped back, though in truth the cement floor of this place felt remarkably cold through the soles of my pinching loafers.

I could hardly believe it, but in time the manager did return, and he listened politely to my father’s tale. He was a short thickset man with three or four parallel creases furrowing each cheek. He had the air-something about the set of his neck in his shoulders expressed it-of having once been an athlete. Now he was wearied and harassed by administration. His hair in thinning backwards had stranded a fore lock, half-gray, which as he talked he kept brushing back brutally, as if to scrub a new sense of focus into his head. His name, Mr. Rhodes, was stitched in a fat script of orange thread on the pocket of his olive coverall. He told us, speaking in hurried puffs between pronounced intakes of breath, “It doesn’t sound good. From what you say, the motor running and the car not moving, it’s in the transmission somewheres, or the driveshaft. If it was just the engine”-he said “enchine” and the way he said it it seemed to mean something different, something pulsing and living and lovable-”I’d send the Jeep down, but this way, I don’t know what we can do. My tow truck’s off after a wreck down on Route 9. Do you have a garage of your own?” He accented “garage” on the first syllable: garritch.

“We use Al Hummel over in Olinger,” my father said.

“If you want me to get after your car in the morning,” Mr. Rhodes said, “I will. But I can’t do anything before then; these two”-he indicated the workmen in front of us; they were flicking chamois pads across the Lincoln’s serene gray skin while the man in the tuxedo rhythmically slapped his palm with an alligator billfold-”go off at ten and that leaves just me and the two off in the wrecker down Route 9. So it’d be just as soon for you probably to call your own garage out in Olinger and have them look after it first thing in the morning.”

My father said, “In your considered opinion, then, as far as tonight goes, my goose is cooked?” Mr. Rhodes confessed, “It don’t sound good, from how you describe it.”

“There’s a little rattle in the back,” I said, “like two cog wheels spinning and just brushing against each other.”

Mr. Rhodes blinked at me and brushed back his forelock. “It might be something in the axle. I’d have to get it up on the rack and take apart the whole rear assembly. Do you live far?”

“Way the hell down in Firetown,” my father said.

Mr. Rhodes sighed. “Well, yes. I’m sorry I couldn’t be more help.” A long scarlet Buick, its paint a swirling cosmos of reflections, nosed in from the street and honked its horn: the blast totally possessed the low concrete cavern and Mr. Rhodes’ attention was deflected from us.

My father said hurriedly, “Don’t apologize, mister. You’ve told me what you think is the truth and that’s the greatest favor one man can do for another.” But outside the garage, again walking in the night, he said to me, “That poor devil didn’t know what he was talking about, Peter. I’ve been a bluffer all my life so I can spot another. He was what they call talking through your hat. I wonder how he got to be manager of an important place like that; I bet he doesn’t know himself. He acted just the way I feel half the time.”

“Where are we going now?”

“Back to the car.”

“But it doesn’t go! You know that.”

“I know it and yet I don’t. I have the feeling it’ll go now. It just needed a rest.”

“It isn’t just the motor being cold, it’s something in the body!”

“That’s what that man was trying to tell me but I can’t get it through my thick head.”

“But it’s nearly ten o’clock. Shouldn’t you call Mother?”

“What can she do? We’re on our own, kid. The devil take the hindmost.”

“Well I know perfectly well if the car didn’t move an hour ago it won’t move now. And I’m freezing.”

As we walked down Seventh, I hurrying and continually failing to close that gap of a step which was always between us, a drunk slipped out of a dark doorway and capered along beside us. For an instant I thought he was the hitchhiker, but this man was smaller and further gone in degeneracy. His hair was wild like the mane of a muddy lion and it stood straight out from his head like the rays of the sun. His clothes were preposterously tattered and he wore a frazzled old over coat around his shoulders in the manner of a cape, so that its empty arms waved and bobbled about him as he pirouetted. He asked my father, “Where are you going with this boy?”

My father obligingly slowed his walk so that the drunk, who had stumbled in skipping sideways, could keep pace with us.

“I beg your pardon, mister,” he said. “I didn’t hear your question.”

The drunk exercised an elaborate, pleased control over his intonation, like an actor marvelling at his own performance. “Oh ho ho,” he rumbled softly but distinctly. “You dirty, dirty man.” He waved his finger back and forth in front of his nose and peered at us roguishly through this wind shield-wiper action. For all his raggedness on this bitter night there was much that was merry about him; his face was flat and hard and bright and his teeth were set in his grin like a row of small seeds.

To me he said, “You go home, boy, home to your mother.” We had to stop or else bump into him. “This is my son,” my father said.

The drunk turned from me to him So quickly all his clothes fluffed up like feathers. He seemed to be not so much dressed as shingled in rags, layer on layer of torn multi-textured scraps. His voice was like that, too, hoarse and broken and indefinitely soft. “How can you lie?” he said sadly to my father. “How can you lie about a thing so serious? Now let this boy go home to his mother.”

“That’s where I’m trying to take him,” my father said. “But the damn car won’t start.”

“He’s my father,” I said, hoping this would make the drunk go away. But it brought him closer to us. His face under the blue streetlight seemed splashed with purple. “Don’t lie for him,” he said with exquisite gentleness. “He’s not worth it. How much is he giving you? I don’t care how much it is, it’s never enough. When he gets a new pretty boy he’ll throw you out on the street like an old Trojan.”

“Daddy, let’s go,” I said, frightened now, and chilled clear through. The night went in one side of me and came out the other and encountered no obstacle.

My father began to push around him and the drunk lifted his hand and my father in answer lifted his own hand. This made the drunk take a back step and he nearly fell. “Knock me down,” the drunk said, smiling so broadly his cheeks gleamed. “Knock me down when I want to save your soul. Are you ready to die?” This made my father jerk still like a halted movie. The drunk, seeing his triumph, repeated, “Are you ready to die?”

The drunk nimbly sidestepped to me and put his arm around my waist and gave me a hug. His breath was like the odor the seniors taking chemistry sometimes left in Room 107 before we came in for Thursday study hall-a complex stench both sulphurous and sweet. “Ah,” he told me, “you’re a good warm body. But you’re all skin and bone. Doesn’t the old bastard feed you? Hey, you,” he called to my father, “what sort of an old lech do you call yourself lifting these poor boys off the street with empty stomachs?”

“I thought I was ready to die,” my father said, “but now I wonder if anybody ever is. I wonder now if a ninety-nine year-old Chinaman with tuberculosis, gonorrhea, syphilis, and toothache is ready to die.”

The drunk’s fingers began to gouge under my ribs and I jerked out of his grasp. “Daddy, let’s go.”

“No, Peter,” my father said, “this gentleman is talking sense. Are you ready to die?” he asked the drunk. “What do you think the answer is?”

Squinting, shoulders back, chest preening, the drunk with pigeon dignity stepped into my father’s tall shadow and, looking up, told him carefully, “I’ll be ready to die when you and everybody like you is locked up in jail and they throw away the key. You can’t even let these poor kids rest on a night like this.” He looked over at me under frowning eyebrows and said, “Shall we call the cops, kid? Let’s kill this old nance, huh?” To my father he said, “What about it, chief? How much is it worth to you not to have me call the cops and have you picked up with this flower?” He inflated his chest as if to shout, but the street dwindled northward toward infinity without upholding another visible soul-just the painted brick fronts with the little railed porches characteristic of Alton, the stone stoops now and then bearing an ornamented cement flower-pot, the leafless curbside trees alternating and in the end mixing with the telephone poles. Parked cars lined this street but few passed down it because it met a dead end at the Essick’s factory wall two blocks away. We stood beside the long low cement-block back of a brewery warehouse; its corrugated green doors had slammed tight shut and the memory of the clang seemed to make the air here hard. The drunk began to pluck at my father’s chest, rubbing his thumb and fingers after each pluck as if disposing of a louse or a piece of lint. “Ten dollars,” he said. “Ten dollars and my mouth is”-he pressed three blue fingers against his swollen violet lips and held them there as if testing how long he could hold his breath. At last he lifted them away, exhaled a huge feather of frozen vapor, smiled, and said, “So. Ten dollars buys me, lock, stock, and barrel.” He winked at me and asked, “Is that a bargain, kid, or not? What’s he paying you?”

“He’s my father,” I insisted, frantic. My father was kneading his spotted hands together under the lamplight and the uprightness of his posture seemed a stiffness, as if he had been poleaxed and in the next instant would fall.

“Five dollars,” the drunk quickly said to him, “five lousy dollars,” and without waiting for an answer he dropped to, “one. One little bitty dollar bill so I can get myself a drink and stop freezing to death. Come on, chief, give me a break. I’ll even tell you a hotel where they don’t ask any questions.”

“I know all about hotels,” my father said. “In the Depression I took a job as night clerk at the old Osiris, before they closed it down. The bedbugs got to be as big as the prostitutes so the customers couldn’t tell ‘em apart. I guess the Osiris was before your time.”

The drunk lost his grin. “I come from Easton originally,” he said. It occurred to me with a shock that he was much younger than my father; indeed he was virtually a boy like me.

My father dug into his pocket and brought out some change and gave it to the young man. “I’d like to give you more, my friend, but I just don’t have it. This is my last thirty-five cents. I’m a public school teacher and our pay scale is way behind that of industry. I’ve enjoyed talking to you, though, and I’d like to shake your hand.” And he did. “You’ve clarified my thinking,” he told the drunk.

My father turned and walked back the way we had come, and I hurried to follow. The things we had been trying to reach-the black car, the sandstone house, my distant and by now, surely, intensely worried mother-tugged like weights within my skin, which seemed stretched transparent by starlight and madness. Walking this way we met the wind-that had arisen, and a glass mask of cold was clipped onto my face. Behind us, the drunk kept calling, like an eagle muffled in a storm, “You’re O.K.! You’re O.K.!”

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“To a hotel,” my father said. “That man brought me to my senses. We gotta get you into where it’s warm. You’re my pride and joy, kid; we gotta guard the silver. You need sleep.”

“We must call Mother,” I said. “Right you are,” he said. “Right you are.” The repetition left me with the impression that he wouldn’t do it.

We turned left into Weiser Street. The wealth of neon there made the air seem warmer. One place was grilling hot dogs in the window. Figures liquid in the light poured past, shoulders hunched, faces hid. But they were people and their existing at all exhilarated me, came to me as a blessing and a permission to live myself. My father turned into a narrow doorway I had never noticed. Inside, up six steps and through a blank double door, a surprisingly high open space contained a desk and an elevator cage and some massive stairs and a few frayed chairs all sunk in on themselves and creased. On the left a kind of screen of potted plants held voices and a systematic clink of glass on glass, like a flat bell ringing. There was an odor I had not smelled since, as a child, I would be sent on a Sunday evening to buy a paper pail of oysters at the place, half-restaurant, half-general store, called Mohnie’s. Mohnie was a great sluggish Dutchman in a buttoned black sweater and his place was a whitewashed stone house that had stood here along the pike when the town was called Tilden. A bell rang when you pushed open the door and rang again when it shut behind you. Glum counters of exotic candies and tobaccos ran along one wall and in the rest of the space square tables with oilcloth tablecloths waited for supper customers. In the meantime a few old men sat in the chairs, and I had supposed that the smell of the place was something they brought in with them. There was chewing tobacco in it, and wrinkled shoe leather, and wood cured in dust, and the oysters themselves; carrying the slippery little pail home, its top cleverly folded like a napkin at Sunday dinner, was like stealing a section of Mohnie’s air; I used to feel that I was trailing behind me in the bluish evening air a faint brownish trail, a flavor of oysters that made the trees and houses of the pike subaqueous. Now here the smell was again, fresh.

The clerk, a hunchback with papery skin and hands warped and made lump-knuckled by arthritis, put down his copy of Collier’s and listened, crinkled head cocked, as my father unfolded his wallet, elicited identification cards from it, and explained that he was George W. Caldwell, a teacher at Olinger High School, and that I was his son Peter, and that our home was way the hell over in Firetown, and that we would like a room but did not have any money. A tall red wall stood in the forefront of my skull and at its base I prepared to lie down and weep.

The hunchback waved my father’s cards away and said, “I know you. I have a niece, Gloria Davis, goes to you. She thinks the world of Mr. Caldwell.”

“Gloria’s a hell of a nice girl,” my father said limply.

“A little wild, her mother thinks.”

“I never noticed that.”

“A little too fond of the boys.”

“She’s always been the perfect lady with me.”

The other man turned and selected a key tagged with a great wooden disc. “I’ll give you a room up on the third floor so the noise from the bar won’t be a bother.”

“I certainly appreciate this,” my father said. “Can I give you a check now?”

“Why not wait till morning?” the little bent man asked, the dry skin of his face twinkling as he smiled. “I guess we’ll all still be here.” And he led us up a narrow stairway with a lightly twisted bannister whose varnished surface undulated under my hand like a cat ecstatic at being stroked. The stairs wound around the caged elevator shaft, and vistas of spottily carpeted halls seemed to open at every landing. We went down one hall and our footsteps rattled in the gaps between carpets. At the end of the hall, beside a radiator and a window overlooking Weiser Square, the clerk applied the key to a door and it opened. Here was our destination: all night in ignorance we had been winding toward this room, with its two beds, its one window, its two bureaus, its one naked overhead bulb. The clerk switched the light on. My father shook his hand and told him, “You’re a gentleman and a scholar. We were thirsty, and ye gave us drink.”

The clerk gestured with a shiny crippled hand. “The bath room’s behind that door,” he said. “I think there’s a clean glass in there.”

“I mean, you’re a good Samaritan,” my father said. “This poor kid here is ready to drop.”

“I’m not at all,” I said. Still irritated when the clerk had gone, I asked my father, “What’s the name of this awful place?”

“The New Yorker,” my father said. “It’s a real old-time flea-bag, isn’t it?”

Now I had to argue with him on the other side, this seemed so ungrateful. “Well he was awfully nice to let us in when we didn’t have any money.”

“You never know who your real friends are,” he said.

“I bet if that Davis bitch knew she did me a good turn she’d be screaming in her sleep.”

“Why don’t we have any money?” I asked.

“I’ve been asking myself that for fifty years. The worst of it is, when I write them a check it’ll bounce because I have twenty-two cents in the bank.”

“When do you get paid? Isn’t this the middle of the month?”

“The way I’m going,” my father said, “I never will get paid. The school board reads that report Zimmerman wrote they’ll be asking me for money.”

“Oh who ever reads his reports?” I snapped, angry because I did not know whether or not to undress in front of him.

I was shy with him about my spots, because the sight of them seemed to trouble him so. But then, he was my father, and I draped my coat over a rickety, wired-together chair and began to unbutton my red shirt. He turned and gripped the doorknob. “I gotta get on the move,” he said.

“Where are you going now? Why can’t you stay still?”

“I gotta call your mother and lock up the car. You go to sleep, Peter. We got you up too early this morning. I hate to do that, I’ve been trying to catch up on sleep since I was four years old. Can you go to sleep? Should I bring your books back from the car so you can do some homework?”

“No.”

He looked at me, and seemed on the verge of apology, confession, or a definite offer. There was a word-I did not know it but believed he did-that waited between us to be pronounced. But he only said, “I guess you can go to sleep. You don’t seem to have the jumps like I did when I was your age.” Tugging the door a touch impatiently, so that the half-retracted latch raked the wood, he went out.

The walls of an empty room are mirrors that double and redouble our sense of ourselves. Alone, I felt highly ex cited, as if abruptly introduced into a company of the brilliant and famous and beautiful. I went to the room’s one window and overlooked the radiant tangle of Weiser Square. It was a web, a shuttle, a lake where carlights trickling from all quarters of the city dammed. For two blocks Weiser was the broadest street in the East; Conrad Weiser himself had set the surveyor’s sticks, planning in the eighteenth century a city of width, clarity, and ease. Now here headlights swam as if in the waters of a purple lake whose surface came to my sill. The shopfronts and bar signs made green and red grass along the banks. The windows of Foy’s, Alton’s great department store, were square stars set in six rows; or like crackers made of two grains, the lower half of light yellow wheat and the upper half, where the tan shade was drawn, of barley or rye. Across the way, highest of all, the great neon owl by means of electric machinery winked and unwinked as a wing regularly brought to its beak, in a motion of three successive flashes, an incandescent pretzel. Beneath its feet, polychrome letters alternately proclaimed:

OWL PRETZELS

“None Better”

OWL PRETZELS

“None Better”

This sign and the lesser signs-an arrow, a trumpet, a peanut, a tulip-seemed to possess reflections in mid-air, to shimmer on the transparent plane that extended over the square at the height of my hotel room. Cars, stoplights, twinkling shadows that were people, all merged for me in a visual liquor whose fumes were the future. City. This was city: the room I stood alone in vibrated on its paper walls with the haloes of advertisement. Well back from the window, seeing but unseen, I continued to undress, and the patches of scabbed skin I touched seemed the coarsely mottled outer petals of a delicate, delicious, silvery vegetable-heart I was peeling toward. I stood in my underpants, on the edge of a swim; reeds and mud took the print of my bare feet; Alton seemed herself already bathing in the lake of the night. The windowpane’s imperfections rippled the wet lights. A virginal sense of the forbidden welled over me like a wind and I discovered myself a unicorn.

Alton distended. Her arms of white traffic stretched riverward. Her shining hair fanned on the surface of the lake. My sense of myself amplified until, lover and loved, seer and seen, I compounded in several accented expansions my ego, the city, and the future, and during these seconds truly clove to the center of the sphere, and outmuscled time and tide. I would triumph. Yet the city shuffled and winked beyond the window unmoved, transparent to my penetration, and her dismissal dwindled me terribly. Hurrying as if my smallness were so many melting crystals which would vanish altogether if not gathered swiftly, I partially redressed and got into the bed nearest the wall; the cold sheets parted like leaves of marble, and I felt myself a dry seed lost in the folds of earth. Dear God, forgive me, forgive me, bless my father, my mother, my grandfather, now let me sleep.

As the sheets warmed, I enlarged to human size, and then, as the dissolution of drowsiness crept toward me, a sensation, both vivid and numb, of enormity entered my cells, and I seemed a giant who included in his fingernail all the galaxies that are. This sensation operated not only in space but in time; it seemed, as literally as one says “a minute,” an eternity since I had risen from bed, put on my bright red shirt, stamped my foot at my mother, patted the dog through the frosted metal mesh, and drunk orange juice. These things seemed performed in photographs projected on a mist at the distance of the stars; they mixed with Lauren Bacall and Doris Day and via their faces I was returned to the bracing plane of everyday. I became aware of details: a distant rumble of voices, a spiral of wire holding together the leg of a chair a few feet from my face, the annoying flicker of lights on the walls. I got out of bed and lowered the shade and returned to bed. How warm the room was, compared with my room at Firetown! I thought of my mother and for the first time missed her; I longed to inhale her scent of cereal and to forget myself in watching her plod back and forth in our kitchen. When I saw her again I must tell her I understood why she moved us to the farm and that I did not blame her. And I must show my grandfather more respect and listen when he talks because…because…he will not always be with us.

My father seemed to come into the room at this moment, so I must have fallen asleep. My lips felt swollen, my bare legs boneless and long. His great shadow cut across the strip of pink light that the lowered shade left standing along the wall by the corner. I heard him set my books down on our table. “You asleep, Peter?”

“No. Where have you been?”

“I called your mother and Al Hummel. Your mother tells me to tell you not to worry about anything, and Al’s going to send his truck in for the car in the morning. He thinks it sounds like the driveshaft and he’ll try to get second-hand parts for me.”

“How do you feel?”

“O.K. I was talking to an awfully nice gentleman down stairs in the lobby; he travels all over the East consulting with these big stores and companies about their advertising programs and clears twenty thousand a year with a two-month vacation. I told him that was the kind of creative work you were interested in and he said he’d like to meet you. I thought of coming up to get you but figured you could probably use the sleep.”

“Thanks,” I said. His shadow cut back and forth across the light as he took off his coat, his tie, his shirt.

His voice chuckled. “The hell with him, huh? I guess that’s the attitude to take. A man like that would walk over your dead body to grab a nickel. That’s the kind of bastard I’ve done business with all my life; they’re too smart for me.”

When he got into bed, after his body stopped rustling the sheets, there was a pause, and he said, “Don’t worry about your old man, Peter. In God we trust.”

“I’m not worried,” I said. “Good night.”

There was another pause, and then the darkness spoke: “Pleasant dreams, as Pop would say.” And his evoking my grandfather unexpectedly did make this strange room safe enough to sleep in, though a woman’s voice giggled down the hall, and doors kept slamming above and below us.

My sleep was simple and deep and my dreams scanty. When I awoke, all I remembered was being in an endless chemical laboratory, like a multiplication with mirrors of the basins and test tubes and Bunsen burners in Room 107 at Olinger High. There was on a table a small Mason jar such as my grandmother used to put up applesauce in. Its glass was clouded, I picked it up and put my ear to the lid and heard a tiny voice, as high in pitch as the voice that calls numbers in a hearing test, saying with a microscopic distinctness, “I want to die. I want to die.”

My father was already up and dressed. He stood by the window, its shade raised, and looked down at the city stirring itself into the gray morning. The sky was not clear; clouds like the undersides of long buns unrolled beyond the brick horizon of the city. He opened a window, to savor Alton, and the air tasted different from yesterday’s: milder, preparatory, stirred. Something had moved nearer.

Downstairs, our clerk had been replaced by a younger man, who stood straight and did not smile. “Has the old gentleman gone off duty?” my father asked.

“It’s a funny thing,” the new clerk said, without smiling at all. “Charlie died last night.”

“Huh? How could he do that?”

“I don’t know. It happened around two in the morning, they said. I wasn’t supposed to come on until eight. He just got up from the desk and went into the men’s room and died on the floor. Heart, it must have been. Didn’t the ambulance wake you?”

“Was that siren for my friend? I can’t believe what you’re saying. He was a wonderful Christian to us.”

“I didn’t know him very well myself.” The clerk accepted my father’s check only after a long explanation, and with a doubtful grimace.

My father and I scraped together the change in our pockets and found enough for breakfast at a diner. I had one dollar in my wallet but did not tell him, intending it to be a surprise when things got more desperate. The counter of the diner was lined with workmen soft-eyed and gruff from behind half-asleep still. I was relieved to see that the man working the griddle was not our hitchhiker. I ordered pancakes and bacon and it was the best breakfast I had had in months. My father ordered Wheaties, mushed the cereal into the milk, ate a few bites, and pushed it away. He looked at the clock. It said 7:25. He bit back a belch; his face whitened and the skin under his eyes seemed to sink against the socket bone. He saw me studying him in alarm and said, “I know. I look like the devil. I’ll shave in the boiler room over at school, Heller has a razor.” The pale grizzle, like a morning’s frost, of a day-old beard covered his cheeks and chin.

We left the diner and walked south toward the high dull owl of dead tubing. A tenuous winter mist, released by the rise in temperature, licked the damp cement and asphalt. We boarded a trolley at Fifth and Weiser. The interior was gay with the straw of the seats, and warm and nearly empty. Few other people were heading outwards against the pull of the city. Alton thinned; the row houses split like ice breaking; a distant hill was half tranced green and half new pastel houses; and after the long gliding stretch beyond the ice cream stand crowned by a great plaster replica of a cone, the motley brick houses of Olinger took hold around us. The school grounds and then the salmon-brick school appeared on the left; the boilerhouse smokestack admonished the sky like a steeple. We got out by Hummel’s Garage. Our Buick was not there yet. We were not late today; cars were still nosing into their slots. An orange bus racily heaved through a loop and swayed to a stop; students the size of birds, colored in bright patches, no two alike, tumbled from the doors in pairs.

As my father and I strode along the pavement that divided the school side lawn from Hummel’ss alley, a little whirlwind sprang up before us and led us along. Leaves long dead and brittle as old butterfly wings, an aqua candy wrapper, flecks and dust and seed-sized snips of gutter chaff all hurried in a rustling revolution under our eyes; a distinctly circular in visible presence outlined itself on the walk. It danced from one margin of grass to another and sighed its senseless word; my instinct was to halt but my father kept striding. His pants flapped, something sucked my ankles, I closed my eyes. When I looked behind us, the whirlwind was nowhere to be seen.

In the school we parted. A student, I was held by regulations to this side of the wire-reinforced doors. He pushed through and walked down the long hall, his head held high, his hair fluffed from the removal of his blue knit cap, his heels pounding the varnished boards. Smaller and smaller he grew along their perspective; at the far door he became a shadow, a moth, impaled on the light he pressed against.

The door yielded; he disappeared. With a grip of sweat, terror seized me.